Now consider philosophy of religion. Prima facie, if we applied Goldman's principle this seems the road to take. However, if self-selection and confirmation entirely explain the prevalence of theism in PoR, this is not the right course to take. After all, in consulting astrologers, who are the supposed experts in astrology, I would find that the large majority of them believe that astrology works. As Alexander Pruss argued in the comment section here, if God exists, philosophy of religion is one of the most important areas of philosophy, but if He does not, it's peripheral. So we can expect a self-selection effect. Combined with confirmation bias, there is an additional worry that theistic philosophers of religion might overvalue the strength of theistic arguments, since theists in general evaluate these arguments as stronger. In fact, I found no significance for PoR as an AOS in how natural theological arguments were evaluated taking religious belief into account. Confirmation bias does not disappear even in people with high levels of education. As one commenter on my original entry suggested "My reading of the situation is that philosophy of religion is unhealthy, and further that your data are best understood as demonstrating a statistically significant conflict of interest."
If a self-selection effect is the sole drive of theists to the field of philosophy of religion, and confirmation bias subsequently plays a role in their evaluation of theist arguments, we should be perhaps wiser to suspend judgment. The effects of confirmation bias on the rationality of our beliefs is a bit too large in scope to treat here. Suffice it so say that I am a Kuhnian at heart; I do not worry much about confirmation bias, given its prevalence it makes more sense to counter it by improving diversity within a profession. As I have argued in several papers (e.g., here), a discipline's health does depend on having multiple, disagreeing voices. So philosophy of religion could benefit from having more atheists and agnostics.
They should ask how many people with an AOS in philosophy of religion changed their minds about God's existence in the course of studying it. If they came to the philosophy of religion with a particular set of beliefs but didn't adjust any of them after studying the relevant material, then I suspect confirmation bias.
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